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Public Sector Cloud Integration Services

Achieving enterprise integration, the key for digital transformation

Given government and public sector organizations’ push to modernize by increasing integration and lowering cost without sacrificing security, the need for scalable architecture and integration strategy with Enterprise Integration Platform (EIP) is key to unlocking the value of its investments in cloud, Artificial Intelligence (AI), Machine Learning (ML), Robotic Process Automation (RPA) and other key tools and capabilities.

EIP overview

When done correctly, using an EIP accelerates digital transformation by providing the connective tissue between applications and devices to drive seamless integration and innovation. However, to do so, it is imperative to possess the appropriate vision, ability to execute, and deliberate governance to manage services that are essential to deliver a digital experience for our citizens.

Establishing an EIP strategy

Evolving vendor landscapes, new solutions, services, and disruptions opens the door to getting things wrong without the proper enterprise integration strategy, tools, and techniques. Adopting an EIP strategy tailored to public sector organizations may alleviate these integration woes in an increasingly “as-a-service” world.

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Digital Ecosystem

Decision makers often ask questions such as, “What are you integrating?”, “What business problems are you trying to solve?”, and “How do you assess which systems, applications, and third-party data services are in-scope?” Answering these questions is not easy, but the idea here is not to catalog every integration at the outset. It is about building a platform that will integrate your digital ecosystem - both current and future.

Digital Ecosystem is a dynamic, interconnected network that facilitates exchanges between providers and consumers of data. Ecosystem integration allows departments and agencies to use new and legacy technologies—and build automated processes around them—to grow with the evolving mission.

Enterprise Integration

Big forces—such as cloud computing, analytics, artificial intelligence, and mixed reality—are shaping and transforming the business and IT landscape of the future. As leaders traverse today’s changing landscape, public sector and government organizations could find themselves merely responding to developments rather than moving strategically to get ahead of challenges. These challenges require the development and implementation of a comprehensive Enterprise Integration Strategy.

Enterprise Integration Strategy consists of recognizing that integration is a shared service, a platform by itself that helps all the other applications and relative datasets talk to each other. A comprehensive enterprise integration strategy, built on the principles of composability and reusability, provides a holistic approach to connecting applications, data, and devices—whether in cloud or on-premises—resulting in a well-connected digital ecosystem.

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The business case for enterprise integration

Building an EIP is an investment and, like all investments, it raises the question: “Who should invest and why?” In most organizations, the CIO owns the IT organization. However, most applications that the IT organization manages have business owners who guide the funding, functions, and upgrade plans. This creates an interesting dynamic where the IT organization must justify its business case for re-platforming integrations that apparently work well in production. It also provides a unique opportunity for synergy as the IT organization has complete visibility over the entire technology landscape. Some key insights to supporting the business case include:

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Reduce, reuse, re-invest

Poorly defined integration is costly to manage and modify—the savings for an API happen not when it is created but when it is reused. Every additional API or interface costs time and money to maintain. It is not uncommon for project teams to duplicate APIs as they work on their respective projects, thereby creating several point-to-point interfaces using a fancy (meaning costly) integration platform. And some cloud-based platforms charge by the API. We should also consider the human cost of monitoring and managing this ever-growing list of APIs.

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Single Pane of Glass

Cloud is a fact of life and is here to stay. A heterogenous environment with applications spread across multiple cloud and on-premises environments can be an integration challenge if addressed piecemeal. An interface in such an environment must navigate firewall rules, IPSec tunnels, DNS entries, and so forth, and issues can easily escalate to unmanageable proportions if each one has to be provisioned separately. An EIP simplifies this by acting as a hub: Firewalls talk to the EIP only on predefined ports, so the network boundaries are cleaner and safer.

Security lock

Unlock Data-At-Rest

Big data is an integration problem, and analytics work great if you collect, sort, and tag the data in one place. The challenge is to collect this structured and unstructured data from different sources and clean, validate, and cross-reference it for analytics to use. An EIP makes this a lot easier.

Preparing the workforce and organization

Enterprise Governance

This is not just limited to access controls and encryption; a common platform is a useful tool for managing audit trails and setting monitors. It can also be the place where data redaction and obfuscation filters can be implemented, if needed.

Customer Centric

The EIP serves as the API library, constantly adding new services. This ready-to-use library of APIs improves business agility, makes it easier to build new applications, and improves overarching security posture for PII and PHI data sets by embedding industry-leading cyber countermeasures into the fabric of the EIP and APIs that it manages. It also opens channels for better customer experience and 360-degree customer views.

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Deloitte’s structured approach enables an investment in an EIP to pay for itself, not only in terms of the money saved but also in improving the agility of the IT ecosystem.

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Adopting the enterprise perspective

Putting together all the pieces of a next-generation enterprise is critical. Cloud is here to stay, and it can play a big part in how you operate as a next-generation enterprise. Effectively connecting cloud capabilities to other cloud capabilities and to more traditional systems will be a mandatory skill for the next-generation enterprise.

Download the PDF to read more about our five steps to implement enterprise integration.

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Get in touch

Thomas Beck
Principal | Public Sector
thbeck@deloitte.com
+1 313 394 5056
 

Oniel Cross
Principal | Public Sector
ocross@deloitte.com
+1 571 814 7265